Schaffer on the Hustings, Pt. 2: Malignant Historiography and Self-Healing August 26, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Adrian Wilson, Allon White, G. M. Trevelyan, Gaston Bachelard, Ian Watt, Joseph Ben-David, Karl Popper, Peter Burke, Peter Stallybrass, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Terry Eagleton
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Pt. 1 of this post began a discussion that stems from (but extends well beyond) two works of Simon Schaffer: 1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century”; and 2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain”. These works identified misleading narratives within a broader social and cultural historiography: a rise of reasoned polity and culture, and a decline of superstition and enchantment. I suggested that in critiquing these narratives Schaffer had taken to the hustings to show how these narrative faults could be remedied by making use of then-recent insights in the historiography of science. According to Schaffer, in order for all historical beliefs (scientific or superstitious) to survive and proliferate, their proponents had to engage in polemics that portrayed the beliefs as beneficial — and opposed beliefs as dangerous — to the social order.
In a sense, Schaffer was playing a role that is quite similar to the people he was writing about. As he wrote in (1), “Representations about nature were stabilized … because … natural philosophers made their representations grip key interests within culture.” His diagnosis of a historiographical ill and offer of a remedy from the historiography of science should invite us to consider why the diagnosis and remedy were deemed apt by the critic, and why he thought it would be received as apt by his intended audience. Also, as Aaron suggested in the comments to Pt. 1, we should likewise be open to questioning who this audience really was. (more…)
Schaffer on the Hustings, Pt. 1 August 24, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Adrian Wilson, Allon White, Ian Hacking, Michel Foucault, Nick Jardine, Peter Stallybrass, Simon Schaffer, Thomas Kuhn
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This post looks at two works from the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer:
1) “Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century” in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levin, 1993, pp. 128-157.
2) “A Social History of Plausibility: Country, City and Calculation in Augustan Britain” in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson, 1993, pp. 279-318.
Both papers find Schaffer on the hustings. As historian of medicine Adrian Wilson puts it in the introduction to the Rethinking Social History volume, “Simon Schaffer’s chapter … can be read as a plea to social historians to concern themselves with the history of science.” This appeal is made by identifying certain misconceptions about the role of science in history prevalent in a broader historiography. According to Schaffer:
Received history has it that the eighteenth century was a crucial period for the establishment of [realist] regimes. The novel and the experimental report appeared as legitimate means of representing the moral and the natural order…. Somehow or other, older, courtly forms of making knowledge failed or were thrust aside. (1; 283/5)
Likewise:
The social history of [stories about claims about things like humans giving birth to animals, perpetual motion, and the inverse square law of gravity] has typically been described in terms of the ‘decline of magic’ and the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ (2; 128) (more…)
Wang on PSAC, Pt. 3: Attitudes and Ideas in the History of Policy August 16, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography, EWP Book Club.Tags: Benjamin Greene, Dwight Eisenhower, Edward Teller, John Kennedy, Lewis Strauss, Robert McNamara, Zuoyue Wang
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In Pt. 2 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow, I critiqued Wang’s adherence to a central analytical rubric pitting an “enthusiasm” for technological “fixes” against a more reserved “skepticism”. I argued that the rubric led to misleading interpretations of selected quotes. It modified, rather than moved beyond, a questionable narrative of 20th-century ideas about the relationship between politics and science. Finally, the narrative mainly seemed to function as a way of explaining why good reason often fails to prevent bad outcomes — as might be expected given the narrative’s origins in historical polemics.
Nevertheless, readers of this book who are prepared to disagree with certain aspects of it can and should still find a great deal that is useful. My more pressing concern is what aspects of history are simply forgotten because they can only be found by probing beyond what the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric can parse.
One key issue is the characterization of the importance of the President’s Science Advisory Committee as fulfilling an almost unique role as scientific skeptics in a government apparently otherwise enamored with the prospect of technological fixes to policy problems. However, this creates the impression that those whose general attitudes are labeled enthusiastic held a belief in something like what we might call “technology without policy”.
Wang on PSAC, Pt. 2: Enthusiasm, Skepticism, and Theodicy August 8, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography, EWP Book Club.Tags: Herbert York, James Conant, Jan Golinski, John Kennedy, Lee DuBridge, Simon Schaffer, Yaron Ezrahi, Zuoyue Wang
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In Part 1 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America, I suggested Wang’s use of a dichotomy between technological enthusiasm and technological skepticism as his central analytical rubric held the book back from being as illuminating as it might have been. Part 2 explains how it does so.
As I noted in Pt. 1, the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric clearly has a moral resonance: enthusiasm is bad, skepticism is good. Once a moral dichotomy has been established, historiography easily fades into “theodicy” — an explanation for why there is evil in the world. The theodicy of science basically goes like this: if science, or indeed knowledge, is supposed to make the world a better place, then why does it fail to do so? Why does it sometimes seem, or threaten, to make the world worse? A common mid-to-late-20th-century version is: why did scientists fail to stop the Cold War?
No sane historian would actually phrase the question this way, but using the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric more-or-less implies the question, simply because the rubric’s terms are one answer to the problem of theodicy. Blind enthusiasm for science and technology as a simple “fix” can result in evil. Skepticism can prevent that evil. Where skepticism fails, enthusiasm may prevail. This line of reasoning rose in reaction to Enlightenment thought, often to reinforce the legitimacy of religious ethics and tradition-based government in the face of an idolatry of reason (see, for example, Chris’ post on Maistre, or Schaffer and Golinski on attempts to constrain scientific “genius”, or Schaffer on the criticism of Whewell). Importantly, though, this critique is mainly just a modification or inversion of the Enlightenment argument. Where the Enlightenment pitted the potential of rational governance against superstition and arbitrary authority, the enthusiasm of rationality and technology is simply recast as an impostor, a new form of “faith” to be overcome by those purporting to represent a truly rational response to the evils of the world.
What this rather elaborate critique has to do with PSAC is that the instantiation of a group scientists at the highest level of power, the White House, becomes the scene for an important confrontation of good and evil, or reason and blindness. Historiographically, this rubric translates into mundane, but still very important, consequences that manifest themselves in style and composition: it defines what questions are worth asking, which explanations and descriptions of historical events and ideas suffice, and which ones will suggest the need to ask other questions and bring in additional context in order to feel satisfied that an adequate understanding of past events has been reached.
Wang on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), Pt. 1 August 6, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography, EWP Book Club.Tags: Allan Needell, Rachel Carson, Richard Nixon, William Newman, Zuoyue Wang
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Though a visible and important office in American policy history, and though, historically, it has been much discussed, PSAC has garnered surprisingly little analysis by historians. Thus Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers UP, 2008) automatically constitutes a valuable contribution to the historiography.
PSAC’s predecessor body, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was established in 1951 during the Korean War. Although comprised of highly respected members of the scientific community, that committee was a marginal body, and it was replaced by PSAC following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and reconsideration of American government’s management of its scientific and technological resources. PSAC’s chair served as the science adviser to the President until 1973 when Richard Nixon dissolved PSAC. In 1976 Gerald Ford established a new organization, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Though its exact structure and function have varied from administration to administration, that body still exists, and its director (currently John Holdren) serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Wang’s book covers this whole history, with the OSTP period as an epilogue.
In my own experience, the further one gets from World War II, the more convoluted and confusing the terrain becomes, the less helpful the historiography becomes, the more difficult it becomes to write good, coherent history. Wang’s book flips this on its head. 
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